Eminent Person 2013…The Interview…Waleed Hakeem

Here We Go…• The “Eminent Person”

project is a new and exciting experience for me and all my Grade 9 peers. I have become comfortable blogging now (It is quite fun, actually) and I have readily prepared ideas for my speech. That’s where it hit me…

“Hello? Have you forgotten about me?”

Interview

The interview!!!Yikes!

The Approach• I have to be honest… I wasn’t too thrilled on

the idea of an interview. Simply because I had never done it before! We had discussed about ‘shooting’ and ‘fishing’ questions in class, so asking questions wasn’t what I was worried about. It was searching for interviewees and conducting the interview that I was nervous about. I kept asking myself the same question, “Where do I start?”

Where do I start?

Hello,My name is Waleed Hakeem and I am in the TALONS program at Gleneagle secondary in Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada, as a Grade 9 student. The TALONS program is a program for gifted learners. Currently, we are doing our annual Eminent Person Study this month. This project requires everyone to choose a person to study who they feel is eminent in some way. This year, I chose to study Beethoven. I am required to conduct an interview as part of my study. Since you have a very good understanding of Beethoven, I was wondering if you would be willing to help me by being my interviewee? The interview can be done via E-mail, phone, etc. That would be much appreciated. Please get back to me as soon as you can. For more information about the TALONS program, here is a link to the TALONS blog. • http://talonsblog.wordpress.comYours Truly,Waleed Hakeem

To begin, I searched up my Eminent Person, Beethoven, on Wikipedia and scrolled down to the bottom and

browsed through the reference list. I was surprised to see many names there and clicked on as many as I could get a hold of. Plus, I looked at UBC’s faculty directory and see

if anyone would be of use in the music department.

In the end, I sent out the following E-mail to the listed individuals below :

1) Barry Cooper (London, UK)2) Lewis Lockwood (New York, USA)3) William Kinderman (Illinois, USA)4) Harvey Sachs (New York, USA)5) Owen Tyndall (TALONS Alumni)

6) UBC Music Department

Approached Interviewee E-mail ResponseBarry Cooper Dear Waleed Hakeem,

 Thank you for your message. I can’t really spend time being interviewed by numerous grade 9 students, and in my view this is not a reasonable requirement for your course. If you had a specific query where you could not find the answer from the standard literature, I’d be happy to advise, but not a general interview. May I suggest you interview a friend of yours instead? Best regards,Barry Cooper

Lewis Lockwood I am sorry but I am too busy right now to be able to help you. You might approach William Kinderman, University of Illinois.L. Lockwood

William Kinderman No Response

Harvey Sachs Dear Waleed,

Thank you for writing to me. I would be happy to be your interviewee about Beethoven. We can do the interview either by email or by phone, as you prefer. I live in New York, but from my home telephone I can call anywhere in North America at no extra charge, so if you want to do the interview by phone it would be quite easy.By the way: I am part Canadian.

Best wishes,Harvey Sachs

Owen Tyndall No Response

UBC Music Department No Response

YAY!• I did it! I managed to

receive an interview. My next step was to prepare and finalize my questions!

• When thinking of questions, the one thing I asked myself was, “What is something you want to know about Beethoven that you cannot find online or in other literature?”

Question Time!

1) Beethoven expressed himself – expressed his own “being” and his approach to life – very strongly through his music. But since most of his music is not vocal, therefore does not accompany verbal texts, we cannot pin down exact meaning in it. People who are sensitive to music will feel that Beethoven is communicating something very definite in every note of his music, but if they attempt to tell you what that “something” is, they won’t be able to do it. This is true of instrumental music by other composers, too, but Beethoven seems to be asserting his own ideas and ideals much more intentionally than most of the others. His musical style changed greatly over the course of his lifetime, and music historians generally divide his working life into three periods: the early one, in which one hears more clearly his musical relationship to his predecessors, especially Haydn and Mozart; the middle or “heroic” one, in which his originality bursts forth and he asserts his personality very forcefully; and the late or “transcendent” one, in which he moves toward increasingly abstract and intensely personal forms of musical expression.2) I think of the history of Western music as a sort of river that flows along. Most composers, even the great ones, contribute to the river’s flow, but a few of them actually change the river’s course. Beethoven was among those few. His works could not be ignored by his successors – even those who may not have liked them. Every major composer who came after him was influenced by him in some way – some of them more, some of them less, but everyone felt that influence.3) The main challenge that Beethoven dealt with was his deafness, which first became noticeable when he was in his late twenties and became almost total by the time he was in his mid-forties. This did not impede his actual work – well-trained musicians can “hear,” mentally, the music that they read or write – but it made human contact more and more difficult for him. This sense of isolation strengthened his love for humanity in the abstract but, at the same time, made him increasingly contemptuous of most individual human beings. Of course there were also plenty of practical challenges, of the sort that most artists (and non-artists) face during their lives: worry about money, personal relationships, etc. But the deafness was what made life exceptionally hard for him. He coped with it by retreating into his inner self and producing some of the greatest works in the history of human achievement.

This is what I managed to think of…The responses are on the right.

1) What type of personality/mood/style did

Beethoven's music possess? 2) How did Beethoven's music

influence modern music?3) Beethoven dealt with many

challenges during his career. How did he cope with them?

Hmmm….

• Hi Harvey,Thanks for your responses. They are very clear and informative. You mentioned in the second question, "His works could not be ignored by his successors – even those who may not have liked them" Just two follow-up questions:1) Why do you think some people didn't like Beethoven or his work? 

2) How do you think people reacted emotionally to Beethoven's compositions?

Thank you. These will be my final questions of the interview. I appreciate your contribution to my project. • Yours Truly,• Waleed H.

Harvey Sachs’s responses were well written and very insightful. What he had wrote to me was

information I could possibly use in my speech. However, despite

the depth and concise responses, I wanted to ask a

follow-up question about one of his points. So I wrote him this E-

mail…

And Once Again…

• Hi again, Waleed.• 1) Different people will always have different

tastes. Even today, there are some people who love the music of other great composers but don’t love Beethoven’s music. But there aren’t many of them! In his own day, however, his music was considered revolutionary, and much of it was also difficult to perform. Even some well-trained musicians at that time found Beethoven’s music incomprehensible. Others, however, realized that Beethoven had ventured where no other musician had previously gone, and that he was pointing the way to the future, too.

• 2) Many people were immediately touched and impressed by Beethoven’s music; others found it too modern and difficult. There was a wide variety of reactions. But even though he wasn’t the most popular composer in Europe, by the end of his life he was the most respected one, and loved by many thousands of music-lovers.

• I would be happy to see the results of your project, when it’s finished. In the meantime, good luck!

• Harvey Sachs

He replied…

Did You Hear that?• Harvey wanted to see the rest of my project.

Looks like I’m going to have to explain the rest of the project if I want to do that.

To Conclude…• To conclude, I am happy

to say that the interview wasn’t so bad after all! It gave me a chance to receive some insightful information from an educated person on my eminent person.

• Next up, Speech and Learning centers!

Topic WeightOrganization /10Information /15Overall /25

Above is my evaluation break-down choice